The Cases That Haunt Us (2 page)

I cautioned the producers the same way everyone in my unit had been trained to caution the police and law enforcement agencies around the United States and the world with whom we dealt: our work can only be as good as the case information provided to us. Many of the tools we’d have to work with today—fingerprints,
DNA
and other blood markers, extensive crime-scene photography—were not available in 1888, so I’d have to do without them in developing my analysis. But then, as now, I would still begin with the known facts of the crimes.

Like most serial murders, the case is complicated, with multiple victims and leads that go off in many directions. It is therefore useful to go into the case narrative in some detail, just as we would if we were receiving it from a local law enforcement agency seeking our assistance. So we’ll relate the details—anything that might be important to the profile—and analyze each element at the proper point in the decision- making process. In that way, we can see something of how the analytical decisions in mindhunting are made and on what they are based. By the time we present the profile, you should have some background and perspective for understanding the choices and conclusions I’ve come to. We can then apply this process to all of the subsequent cases we’ll consider. The more a profiler knows of the story of
what
happened, the better able he or she will be in putting together the
why
and the
who.

Whenever we construct a profile or offer analytical or strategic assistance to a local law enforcement agency on a series of unsolved crimes, a critical part of the case materials we request is a map with crime scenes indicated and a description of what each area is like. And in this case, geography is a particularly important consideration because it so carefully defines the type of victim selected and type of offender who would feel comfortable here.

“
THE
ABYSS”

I always stress the importance of understanding the victimology and social context of the crime. And you can’t understand this case without some comprehension of what life was like in the East End of London, specifically Whitechapel and Spitalfields, in the final decades of the Victorian era. Adventure novelist Jack London would characterize this area as “the Abyss” after spending seven weeks living there during the summer of 1902. The nonfiction book that emerged from this experience,
The People of the Abyss
, would become just as much of an instant classic in its own circles as
The Call of the Wild
, published the same year. And the conditions and situation described were little different in 1902 than they had been fourteen years earlier.

The most extreme areas of the East End—the region bordering Whitechapel High Street and Whitechapel Road, just north of the Tower of London and the London Docks—was a strange, distant, and fearful place to those fortunate enough to live elsewhere within the metropolis. Though it was but a short cab or railway journey away from central London, the virtual capital of the Western world when it was true that the “sun never set” on the richest and most economically productive empire in history, this district was a teeming, Dickensian area of factories, sweatshops, and slaughterhouses. Dominated by poor cockneys, it was increasingly populated by immigrants straight off the docks, particularly Eastern European Jews escaping persecution and pogroms, with their strange languages, insular customs, and wariness of gentiles. Many of them joined their fellow countrymen in the tailoring and leather trades centered around Brick Lane. Middlesex Street, better known as Petticoat Lane, became a bustling Sunday marketplace of Jewish goods and culture.

Here in Whitechapel, skilled jobs were scarce and disease was rampant. Those lucky enough to have a place to live were crammed into dirty and primitive accommodations without even the semblance of privacy. The rest, figured to be about 10 percent of the East End’s total population of nine hundred thousand, lived a day-to-day existence—on the streets, in the grim and notorious public workhouses, or in the hundreds of filthy “doss-houses,” which offered a bed for around fourpence a night, paid in advance.

Mary Ann Nichols, known as Polly, was a prostitute, one of about twelve hundred in Whitechapel at the time, according to Metropolitan Police estimates. She was five feet two inches tall, forty-five years of age, and had five missing teeth. Many, if not most, of the women like Nichols were not prostitutes by choice. Existence for them (and often, their families) was so desperate that turning cheap tricks might mean the difference between eating and not eating, between having a place to sleep and taking their chances on the dark and dangerous streets. Add to this the chronic alcoholism through which many women tried to forget their hopelessness, and we see a segment of society living on the very fringe.

Polly Nichols was the mother of five children and the survivor of a tempestuous marriage that had finally broken up over her inability to stay away from the bottle, a situation initially caused, she claimed, by her husband William’s philandering. He was given custody of the children. At a little after 1:00 in the early morning hours of Friday, August 31, 1888, Polly was attempting to finesse her way into a doss-house on Flower and Dean Street, where she’d been sleeping for about a week. She’d spent most of the last month in another doss-house one block over on Thrawl Street, in a room she shared with four other women. But this evening, she didn’t have the required fourpence for her bed, having just spent money she’d earned earlier in the day on liquor at the Frying Pan pub down the block where it intersected with Brick Lane.

The deputy lodging housekeeper would not let her stay without payment. Polly told the man not to give her bed to anyone else and, giddy with drink, declared, “I’ll soon get my doss money. See what a jolly bonnet I’ve got now.” Apparently, the hat had been bought for her by a customer and made her feel more attractive.

At about 2:30 A.M., she met up with her friend Ellen Holland, also known as Emily. In the East End, multiple names were apparently common. Holland, who had previously shared the Thrawl Street room with Polly, had come out to watch a large fire, a common form of entertainment for those too poor to afford any other. She reported Polly to be extremely drunk and leaning against a wall for support.

Ellen urged her to go back to Thrawl Street, but Polly confessed, “I’ve had my lodging money three times today and I’ve spent it. It won’t be long before I’m back.” Then she wandered off in the direction of Flower and Dean Street.

That was the last time anyone saw Polly Nichols alive.

About 3:40 that morning, two carmen, or wagon drivers, Charles A. Cross and Robert Paul, were walking to work along Buck’s Row, about a block from London Hospital on Whitechapel Road, when Cross thought he saw a tarpaulin on the other side of the street near the entrance to a stable. He went over to examine it more closely and see if it was usable. But when he neared the tarp, he realized it was the body of a woman, her eyes wide open, hands by her side, skirts hiked up to her waist, and legs slightly parted. Next to the body was a black, velvettrimmed straw bonnet.

Cross called Robert Paul over. He felt the woman’s face, which was still warm, leading him to believe she might still be alive. He listened intently and thought maybe he detected a faint heartbeat. But Cross felt her hands, which were cold, and concluded she was dead. The two men left to find a policeman.

They found Metropolitan Police constable Jonas Mizen walking his beat on nearby Hanbury Street and told him what they’d found. Mizen hurried back with them to Buck’s Row, where Constable John Neil had just come upon the body on his own. With his lantern, Neil signaled another passing police officer, Constable John Thain. He directed Thain to go find Dr. Rees Ralph Llewellyn, the nearest general practitioner, then told Mizen to secure an ambulance, which in those days meant a two-wheeled wagon long enough to hold a stretcher.

Thain awakened Llewellyn, who arrived on the scene to examine the victim. By this time, two local slaughtermen, Henry Tomkins and James Mumford, were also on scene, though whether they had just happened to show up or had been passing the time with Constable Thain prior to his being called in on the case is unclear. Dr. Llewellyn noted severe lacerations to the victim’s throat, but little blood on or around the body. At about ten minutes to 4 A.M., he pronounced the woman dead, estimating that, since the legs were still warm, death had occurred no more than thirty minutes previously and that she had been killed on the spot. The body was taken to the mortuary at the Old Montague Street Workhouse Infirmary. By the time Inspector John Spratling arrived around 4:30 A.M., a crowd was already forming, and the news of the murder started filtering through Whitechapel. Spratling told the other officers to search the scene and surrounding area, then went to join Dr. Llewellyn at the mortuary to record the official description of the corpse.

At the mortuary, Spratling discovered some even more disturbing information than what he’d expect from the “routine” murder of a prostitute—though, strictly speaking, her status had not yet been confirmed since no identification had been made. Still, the circumstances and the fact that she was out on the street at that hour strongly suggested the vocation. Unfortunately, then as now, prostitute murders were not unheard of, often involving simple robbery or a customer who believed he’d contracted a disease. Once clothing had been removed from the body, Spratling could plainly see that in addition to the neck wounds, the abdomen had been ripped open and the intestines exposed.

The following morning Dr. Llewellyn returned to do a complete postmortem. He noted bruising on the face and neck and a circular incision on the neck that completely severed all the tissues down to the vertebrae as well as the major blood vessels of the neck. The deep cuts appeared to have been made with a sharp, long-bladed knife. Llewellyn believed the killer had at least some rough anatomical knowledge and, from a thumb bruise on the right side of the neck, thought he might be left-handed.

BEHAVIORAL
CLUES

Looking at this case today with a body of knowledge and experience unavailable to the Victorian investigators (it would be several years before even fingerprinting was available), we could already start putting together some behavioral clues from the wound patterns. The severe bruising about the face suggests to me an initial “blitz-style” attack. In other words, the
UNSUB
attempted to neutralize his potential victim quickly and unexpectedly before she could put up a defense. This, in turn, suggests an offender who is unsure of himself and has no confidence in his ability to control her or get her where he wants her through any kind of verbal means—an inadequate personality as opposed to one with the confidence to think he can easily dominate women. This, as we’ll see, gives us even more clues to his personality and emotional background.

The neck bruising indicates an attempt to choke the victim and further render her incapable of resistance. Then we see the multiple deep stab wounds, which suggest a frenzy of anger and, generally, released sexual tension. That the face suffered no other significant wounds after the initial blitz makes me think that the
UNSUB
did not know the victim. If this had been a more personally directed attack, I would have expected to see more obliterating wounds to the face, which would represent her persona or humanness. Like just about everything else in profiling and criminal behavioral analysis, this is not a hard and fast rule, as we’ll see in the next chapter. But in cases in which the motivation for the crime is essentially power and control—a power and control unavailable to the
UNSUB
in any other aspect of life, as I would believe it to be here—facial attack is a common phenomenon.

Then we have the deep, circular incision around the neck. This seems clear to me—an attempt to take the head off the victim. Those who have read any of our previous books will know that one of the ways we categorize killers and other sexual predators is according to whether we consider them organized, disorganized, or mixed—that is, a combination of the two types. A killer who wants to decapitate his victim, especially out on the street, which is always a high-risk environment, is someone who I would suggest is “not all there.” This is further underscored by the ripping open of the belly and the exposure of the intestines. That doesn’t mean he can’t mentally form criminal intent, and it doesn’t imply that organized killers are normal, socially integrated individuals. It does, however, tell me that this UNSUB’s motivations and fantasies are so aberrant that they would interfere with his routine functioning, even his ability to pull off an efficient crime. This is someone who both hates women and has a bizarre and perverse curiosity about the human body that I can only characterize as demented.

While we’re on this subject, let’s clarify one thing. All killers and sexual predators, in my opinion, have some degree of mental illness. By definition, you can’t willingly take another life in this manner and be mentally healthy. However—and this is a big however—though you may be mentally ill, that does not mean that (a) you do not know the difference between right and wrong and (b) you are unable to conform your behavior (not your thoughts necessarily, but your
behavior
) to the rules of society. This is the essence of the M’Naghten Rule, the original codified British legal test of criminal responsibility, which had already been in effect for more than half a century by the time of the Whitechapel murders and which still serves as the basis for the tests of insanity we use today. The rule is named for Daniel M’Naghten, who tried to kill British prime minister Sir Robert Peel, the organizer of London’s Metropolitan Police Force.

So someone can be mentally ill but still criminally responsible—they do what they do because they
want to
rather than because they
have to.
Some psychiatrists refer to this problem as a character disorder, a description that I think is pretty accurate.